In article <mailman.12158.1405983216.18130.python-l...@python.org>, Monte Milanuk <memila...@invalid.com> wrote:
> Any hints/opinions on what those drawbacks might be? I know literally > almost nothing about JS. I worked thru a short generic tutorial a couple > years ago, but nothing like these libraries I see people talking about > now like jquery, angular, ext, and so on. Hence my hesitation at adding > another learning curve on top of python and the various libraries needed > for this first 'real' project. In the beginning, there was javascript. It was used to do cutesy little things like animated U/I elements and perform certain actions when your browser detected events like clicking on a button or moving the mouse cursor over an image. But, javascript is a real (if bletcherous) programming language. It's got functions and variables and loops and if statements and classes (OK, it doesn't really have classes, but it has things that we can pretend are classes, if we squint hard). It can talk to the network and generate HTML on the fly. So, people started building a whole new kind of web site. Instead of having an application running on the server which spits out HTML and CSS, and little bits of javascript to tweak those, we've got a full-blown javascript application running in the browser. That application is retrieving data from the server, doing useful things with it, and totally managing the HTML that you see rendered in your browser window. Things like jquery and (even more so) angular, backbone, ember, etc, are frameworks which make it easier to write these applications, in much the same way frameworks like django make it easier to write server-side web applications in Python. The truly sucky part of this picture is that javascript is a horrible language, but you have no choice. It's the only thing that runs in browsers. On the server side, if you don't like Python, you can write your app in Java, or Go, or Ruby, or a host of other languages (even javascript, if you want). On the client side, no so much. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
